Yes, Amos, your SWAG is pretty much in line with my own lame-assed conclusion. But from a purely physical perspective, it would make more sense to say an actor plays in a television program since the program itself appears to take place inside the television set. At least I guess it still does. It's been a while since I've watched television and they may have perfected in-home holographic projection for all I know.

Even Joe Sixpack does not believe those teensy figures are "in" his TV set. The most analog-minded antedeluvian Luddite knows that the same program, on the air, is reaching his mother's TV across the street at the same time it is reaching into his. So he knows that an actor is "in" a program which is "on" TV.

They're there to bug the hell out of your cats. That's why the cats run around all night long in the dark, to chase the little tv people. The tv folks have the added advantage of being so full of static (just like on the front of the CRT) that they can give cats static shocks. That's why they arch and spit and dance around under the furniture when you'd really rather they curled up quietly and went to sleep.

I myself wouldn't want to even try to geld a cat. Them cats got needle-like teeth and really sharp claws. Just look what happened to ol' Ready-Freddy Rufus Rex when he needed money for beer up at the Legion Hovel and decided to make it by cuttin' cats.

Rufe had been told that their was good money in it, before you know it he'd contracted for about a dozen jobs. He managed somehow to get all twelve cats in a gunnysack an' took 'em out to the silo on the old Andersen place -- the one that Gunnar Andersen built in 1892 and which burned down in mysterious circumstances in 1910. The one out on the section they call "Drybone Desert" cuz there ain't no water even a mile straight down, you know?

Anyway, the silo was the only thing standin', mostly cuz it was make of concrete, and Rufe thought that bein' outside town it would be a good place to cut them cats. He got out his Barlow knife and honed it up and then he let the cats out of the bag.

If you combined a hurricane and a tornado and sleet storm with a mad sandblaster you might get a little bit of an idea what happened next. Let's just say that Rufe didn't fill his contracts, blood was spilt, and all Rufe would say later about it (through the holes in his bandages) was something about "goddamned door locked behind me."

Yeah, he was rescued by some boys from the Lazy O that happened to the passing by and heard the ruckus from the silo. They opened the door and said they never saw nothin' come out by a streak of fur about a hunnert yards long, and when they peeked inside there was a man-sized blood clot on the floor, moaning.

It has no bearing. To have bearing, it must have bears. There are no bears in this thread, just cats. If you would like to introduce a bear or two into the thread, then it will have bearing. However, I would suggest against introducing three bears because that may have the undesired side-effect of causing a little girl to show up and eat all the oatmeal which would mean we wouldn't be able to make a haggis.

Or, you could just forget about bearing all together and introduce a llama so the thread can have llamaing.

I was once befriended by a germ who had been a horse innard -- lived along the banks of one of the main arteries and lived darned well, for a germ, getting first pick of the fresh Kentucky oxygen that coursed through the horse's lungs and heart. He, in turn, had a buddy -- also a germ -- who was never satisfied with his lot, and announced he was going to leave the artery and strike out on his own in search of adventure and a brighter, richer future. Although his fellows tried to dissuade him, this malcontent germ would hear nothing of it, and he set out wiggling one day and made his way across the great plains of the horse's internal cavities until he came to the banks of a secondary vein, which brought used blood back to the lungs for replenishment. The wandering germ found little good to sustain life there, and eventually starved to death.

"So you see," my friend the ex-horse germ said to me, "You should never change streams in the middle of a horse."

I hate to correct someone, but the arteries carry oxygenated blood away from the heart and lungs and toward the capillaries, various organs, etc. Veins return the oxygen-depleted blood to the heart and lungs for recycling.

Arteries carry oxygen rich blood away from the heart. Veins carry oxygen depleted blood back to the lungs and heart. Arterial blood is bright red because it is charged (the hemoglobin is carrying oxygen); venous blood, darker in color because it is lower in oxygen.

You can test this empirically at home, but I wish you would take my word for it!! :D

The swarming behavior of ants, bees, termites, and other social insects has implications far beyond the hive. Swarm intelligence — the collective behavior of independent agents, each responding to local stimuli without supervision — can be used to understand and model phenomena as diverse as blood clotting, highway traffic patterns, gene expression, and immune responses, to name just a few. Swarm technology is proving useful in a wide range of applications including robotics and nanotechnology, molecular biology and medicine, traffic and crowd control, military tactics, and even interactive art.

Students and faculty in the Evolutionary and Swarm Design (ESD) Research Group at the University of Calgary, Canada, use Mac computers and Mac OS X to model swarm behavior and to apply it to an ever-increasing number of real-world problems. Swarm modeling theories provide new conceptual frameworks for extending the field of artificial intelligence and suggest new possibilities for computer hardware and software design.

Christian Jacob has led the ESD Research Group since its inception. Like many swarm researchers, he believes that biologically-inspired computational tools like the ones being developed in the ESD Research Group will prove invaluable for developing many of the important technologies of the twenty-first century.

"What I find intriguing is the fact that very similar principles seem to apply to swarm-like systems regardless of scale," Jacob says. "We can use the models that describe army ant raiding behavior to predict the behavior of automobile traffic or pedestrians on the road. The models that describe how birds and fish flock and school have practical applications in, for example, genetic algorithm test functions and the training of artificial neural network weights."

A Mind of Its Own

In contrast to the top-down organization that characterizes many human endeavors, many social species achieve their communal goals using a purely bottom-up approach with no central command-and-control structure. A swarm of termites, for example, exhibits a collective intelligence that far exceeds the intelligence of any individual insect, which by itself has limited capabilities for processing and communicating information.

The collective intelligence of the swarm emerges in a decentralized way from the actions of individual insects responding to local stimuli from the environment and, most importantly, from other members of the swarm. There is no "boss" in charge. No individual insect grasps the big picture. Yet in the aggregate, the local actions of each insect based on the local stimuli available to it can accomplish a collective goal that serves the interests of the whole community.

I wish we could do that here. I mean, demonstrate a greater intelligence overall than any of us has individually. It would be heart-swarming.

Resting your case is a good idea, but make sure you rest it on the floor. A case should not be confused with an airline tray-table and should never be left in a fully upright position. A case rested against a wall can tip over which can result in damage to the guitar inside the case. Headstocks are particlarly vulnerable to being broken off when cases fall over.

And for God's sake never rest your bass against a wall! I've witnessed one upright bass's neck being snapped off when the instrument tipped over after being leaned against a wall. Makes the damnedest noise you've ever heard.

It has come to my attention that my name was taken in vain recently on this thread. Well, well. I had shaken the dust of this silly forum off my heels quite some time ago, but a sort of morbid curiosity, I suppose, has compelled me to look in on it now and then. I see that Tweed is still around. Pity! He seems worried about the possibility that someone might geld him. Ha! What would be the point? No female still capable of bearing children has ever been attracted to Tweed, so I hardly think we are in danger of his genes being perpetuated or passed on in the usual fashion. No, dears, I think we can all rest easily and put that dark thought entirely out of our minds!

Things have been breathlessly busy around Rutledge Mansion, what with our frequent trips to Europe, the remodeling of the Henry the VIIIth room, the installation of the Roman baths, and Winston's beastly insistence on continuing with the "sporting life", as he calls it (the murder of innocent wild animals and the wastage of perfectly good horses), and Veronica's roaring about madly in her new Porsche! Yes, Winston bought her a zebra-striped Porsche. Veronica could not decide whether to have a black Porsche or a white one, so she said, "Make it in both colours then!" I am told it is the only one ever made in the zebra-striped scheme, and I believe it! I advised against it, not because of the price (astronomical!) or the appearance (hideous!), but because I fear that she may kill herself in it. Veronica drives just as aggressively as Winston, but with only one tenth of his experience and finesse. Like a madwoman, in other words.

It will be on her head if she comes to grief, and I may have to say "I told you so!" to her gravestone, but there seems to be nothing I can do about it.

I do long sometimes for those carefree days in southern Spain, away from the madding crowd, if I may say it, in stuffy old Twillingsgate and boring old London. Becoming married had the salutary effect of causing the immediate evaporation of a host of romantically obsessed pests who fancied themselves as my suitors, but it has burdened me with a mountain of other responsibilities that I sometimes grow weary of.

Meanwhile, Tony Blair and that apelike, subhuman creature George Bush Jr are persisting in their military madness, and the general tenor and grace of society is declining visibly with every passing season...

A Penny and her thoughts. Have we missed you Penny? Well in a way; the sniper we sent missed you, as did the ICBM, we have great hopes of the new booby-trapped shooting stick which our own dear Q is designing, having more success. There is however doubt in some quarters as to whether an exploding shooting stick would have the desired effect, as several of our informants say you are uccustomed to explosions around your nether regions. Yet we live in hope! Giok

My condolences to you on the tedium of your married adventure, and my congratulations to you on the precise characterization of our President here across the great waters, and of his misadventures with our nation in tow.

veins return de-oxygenated blood to the heartArteries carry the de-oxygenated blood from the heart to the lungs and viens carry the OXYGENATED blood from the lungs to the heart. Then it gets pumped out to the body via arteries.

The heart to lung to heart loop is the reverse of the normal cycle. Arteries always carry blood away from the heart, veins to the heart.

...right ventricle fills and then contracts, pushing the blood into the pulmonary artery which leads to the lungs. In the lung capillaries, the exchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen takes place. The fresh, oxygen-rich blood enters the pulmonary veins and then returns to the heart...